8/17/05

... As a psychoanalyst who has been studying Bush's words and behavior in hopes of better understanding his mind, I'm heartened that so many critics have drawn the nation's attention to Bush's need to repeat points and phrases -- even after their inaccuracy has been established. Now critics see clearly his distaste for having to meet with the people whose lives he has forever changed.

"... the most serious problem is that George Bush now believes what he says." Like many of my hospitalized patients, Bush has created a vast, detailed but vague delusional system he feels compelled to maintain at all costs. This system helps him manage the terrifying anxiety that threatens to make his already endangered inner world more chaotic.

The second answer is made clear by his reaction to Cindy Sheehan: he believes his lies because he feels his survival depends on it. He cannot help her mourn; he cannot take responsibility for his destructiveness. If he could he would. His inner need to be right would not just be modified; his entire internal mental structure would be shattered.

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that Bush's true enemy is an aspect of himself -- the overwhelming anxiety he works so hard to manage. For Bush, lying remains a central defense mechanism in managing his fears; he lies foremost to himself, altering his perception of external or internal reality to fulfill his psychic need to maintain order. His anxiety is so great that he cannot shift his thinking to account for new information --especially the fact that patriotic families of patriotic soldiers demand that he speak with them.

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Justin Frank M.D. is an expert in the field of psychoanalysis. A clinician with more than thirty years of experience ... He is the co-director of the Metropolitan Center for Object Relations in New York, a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center, and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute.

Dr. Frank used the principles of applied psychoanalysis to assemble a comprehensive psychological profile of President George W. Bush in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (ReganBooks).

Dr. Frank did his psychiatric residency at Harvard Medical School and was chief resident at the Cambridge Hospital. Dr. Frank was also awarded the DuPont-Warren Fellowship by Massachusetts General Hospital..

Dr. Frank lives in Washington D.C. where he teaches and practices psychoanalysis.
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Pretty scary, eh kids? The REALLY scary part comes when he can no longer defend his beliefs and then we'll find out if he goes catatonic (as on 9-11) or goes the Jeffrey Dahmer/Heinz Kissinger/Richard Nixon totentanz route and becomes the RED DRAGON, the DESTROYER of WORLDS, and screams in orgasmic insanity as he lets it all come down.

I know it may be considered irresponsible for a psychoanalyst to do a public diagnosis without having met the person, but it really seems to fit, and God knows we've seen enough public pathology from Monkey Boy to make even a 5-year-old kid ask "Hey, what's the matter with that man?"

One might wonder if the nuking of American cities may come from Crawford and not Riyadh or Kabul. Let's hope there's someone in the admin to do the job Al Haig did when Nixon went bonkers, keeping Tricky Dick's finger off the trigger and keeping ambitious generals from capitalizing on the mental break period.

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---my thanks to Ambidextrous for pointing to this article ---